Nondual Quotations – 1

These pages contain nondual quotations, many of which I originally posted on the nondual quotes group on Yahoo!

Just don’t seek from another
Or you’ll be far estranged from self.
I now go on alone
Meeting it everywhere
It now is just what I am
I now am not it.
You must comprehend in this way
To merge with thusness.

– Dongshan (771-853)

O you who’ve gone on pilgrimage –
where are you, where, oh where?
Here, here is the Beloved!
Oh come now, come, oh come!
Your friend, he is your neighbor,
he is next to your wall –
You, erring in the desert –
what air of love is this?
If you’d see the Beloved’s
form without any form –
You are the house, the master,
You are the Kaaba, you! . . .
Where is a bunch of roses,
if you would be this garden?
Where, one soul’s pearly essence
when you’re the Sea of God?
That’s true – and yet your troubles
may turn to treasures rich –
How sad that you yourself veil
the treasure that is yours!

~Rumi ‘I Am Wind, You are Fire’
Translation by Annemarie Schimmel

When you understand one thing through
and through, you understand everything.

– Shunryu Suzuki

“How do you go about finding anything?
By keeping your mind and heart on it.
Interest there must be and steady remembrance.
To remember what needs to be remembered
is the secret of success.
You come to it through earnestness”

~Nisargadatta Maharaj
‘I AM THAT’

When one realizes oneself, one realizes the essential nature of
the universe. The existence of duality is only an illusion and
when the illusion is undone, the primordial unity of one’s own
nature and the nature of the universe is realized, or made real.

Sagehood has nothing to do with governing others
but is a matter of ordering oneself. Nobility has
nothing to do with power and rank but is a matter
of self realization. Attain self-realization, and the
whole world is found in the self. Happiness has
nothing to do with wealth and status, but is a matter
of harmony.
– Lao-tze

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes
By the deep sea, and music in its roar.
I love not man the less, but nature more,
From these our interviews in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.
~Lord Byron

This is from ‘The Spirit of Tao’
Trans/edited by Thomas Cleary
The Great Way

The Great Way is very difficult to express in words. Because it
is hard to speak of, just look into beginninglessness, the
beginningless beginning. When you reach the point where there
is not even any beginninglessness, and not even any nonexistence
of beginninglessness, this is the primordial. The primordial Way
cannot be assessed; there is nothing in it that can be assessed.
What verbal explanation is there for it? We cannot explain it,
yet we do explain it-where does the explanation come from?
The Way that can be explained is only in doing. What is doing?
It is attained by nondoing. This nondoing begins in doing.

The true form is magnificently illuminated with gleaming
fire. The teaching’s voice is total silence amid the ringing
of wind chimes. The moon hangs in the old pine tree, cold
in the falling night. The chilled crane in its nest in the
clouds has not yet been aroused from its dreams.
– Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091-1157)

Enlightenment for Everyone
by Andrew Harvey

Essay Excerpt:

It is this Eternal Dance that is always, at every moment, creating,
destroying, and recreating all things; all things in all worlds and
at every subtle level of all known and unknown universes are the
constantly changing and evolving expressions of this secret
lightning-dance, this vast blissful ecstatic dance, the Dance of
the Sacred Marriage between the “masculine” and “feminine” poles
and powers of the Godhead…

When we learn to move beyond mistaken concepts and see clearly,
we no longer solidify reality. We see waves coming and going,
arising and passing. We see that life, composed of this mind and
body, is in a state of continual, constant transformation and flux.
There is always the possibility of radical change. Every moment –
not just poetically or figuratively, but literally – every moment we
are dying and being reborn, we and all of life.

One minute of sitting, one inch of Buddha.
Like lightning all thoughts come and pass.
Just once look into your mind-depths:
Nothing else has ever been.

– Manzan (1649-1709)

Without the rigidity of concepts, the world becomes transparent
and illuminated, as though lit from within. With this understanding,
the interconnectedness of all that lives becomes very clear. We
see that nothing is stagnant and nothing is fully separate, that who
we are, what we are, is intimately woven into the nature of life itself.
Out of this sense of connection, love and compassion arise.

Love and concern for all are not things some of
us are born with and others are not. Rather, they
are results of what we do with our minds: We can
choose to transform our minds so that they embody
love, or we can allow them to develop habits and
false concepts of separation.

The real glory of meditation lies not in any method but in
its continual living experience of presence, in its bliss,
clarity, peace, and most important of all, complete absence
of grasping. The diminishing of grasping in yourself is a sign
that you are becoming freer of yourself. And the more you
experience this freedom, the clearer the sign that the ego
and the hopes and fears that keep it alive are dissolving, and
the closer you will come to the infinitely generous “wisdom
of egolessness.” When you live in the wisdom home, you’ll no
longer find a barrier between “I” and “you,” “this” and “that,”
“inside” and “outside;” you’ll have come, finally, to your true
home, the state of non-duality.

~Sogyal Rinpoche
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

‘The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’
Sogyal Rinpoche

Quoting Dudjom Rinpoche on the buddha-nature:

No words can describe it
No example can point to it
Samsara does not make it worse
Nirvana does not make it better
It has never been born
It has never ceased
It has never been liberated
It has never been deluded
It has never existed
It has never been nonexistent
It has no limits at all
It does not fall into any kind of category

Nirvana
by Sri Aurobindo

All is abolished but the mute Alone,

The Mind from thought released, the heart from grief
Grow inexistent now beyond belief;

There is no I, no Nature, known-unknown.
The city, a shadow picture without tone,

Foundering in shoreless gulfs the world is done.
Only the illimitable Permanent

Is here. A Peace stupendous, featureless, still
Replaces all, what once was I, in It

A silent unnamed emptiness content

Either to fade in the Unknowable
Or thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite.

From: ‘Trying to be Human: Zen Talks from Cheri Huber’

*Separateness*

here on earth would we find a boundary between us?
Would it be the air between us that we both breathe?
Would it be the skin on my body that is participating
in the exact same atmosphere as the skin on your body?

The idea of separateness is something we have to make
up, so we say everything that connects us doesn’t count
because we can’t see it. Of course, if the air weren’t
there all of a sudden, it would become important in a
hurry. But for right now, we choose not to pay attention
to it.

Look and see how you make up separateness within yourself.
Look for your sense of “self’ and “other.” Notice how within
yourself, there arc many selves. Inside or outside yourself,
see if you can find a boundary.

For life in the present there is no death. Death is
not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world.

~Wittgenstein

Enlightenment is the sudden recognition that non-duality
is, has always been, and will always be the reality of
our experience. Duality is an illusion. Consciousness is
not private and personal, but impersonal, universal, and
eternal. There is no limited personal entity, no conscious
ego. The ego is a perceived object, not the all perceiving
awareness.

~Francis Lucille

From: ‘Who Am I? The Sacred Quest’ Jean Klein

Q. Is this source that you turn to see, the ultimate
subject, your real nature?

A. Be very careful. The subject that can be seen is not your
home-ground. What is sometimes called the ultimate subject
is nothing other than silence, sunyata, emptiness of images.
This is consciousness, the light behind all perception.
The subject that is talked about is still in duality, the
subject-object relationship.

The light of consciousness passes through the film of memory
and throws pictures on your brain. Because of the deficient
and disordered state of your brain, what you perceive is
distorted and colored by feelings of like and dislike. Make
your thinking orderly and free from emotional overtones,
and you will see people and things as they are, with clarity
and charity.

~Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

ONE DAY MULLA NASRUDIN GOT WORD THAT HE HAD
received a special message from the Sheik in Basra. When
he went to pick it up they told him he must first identify
himself. Nasrudin fished in his trousers and took out a brass
mirror. Looking into it he exclaimed, “Yup, that’s me all right.”

ONE DAY TESSHU, THE FAMOUS SWORDSMAN AND ZEN
devotee, went to Dokuon and told him triumphantly he believed
all that exists is empty, there is no you or me, and so on. The
master, who had listened in silence, suddenly snatched up his
long tobacco pipe and struck Tesshu’s head.
The infuriated swordsman would have killed the master there
and then, but Dokuon said calmly, “Emptiness is quick to show its
anger, isn’t it?”
Forcing a smile, Tesshu left the room.